Two factors are driving that. Businesses are closing their own data centers, putting more of their technology infrastructure on servers run by giants like Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

And some customers are using the cloud for more than just storing files or running human resources software. Amazon and its rivals offer software that helps sift through enormous volumes of data to look for patterns that identify objects in images, or run simulations designed to find out when a part might break in a manufactured product.

Those tools need a lot of juice.

Amazon and its rivals aim to place data centers relatively close to customers to reduce the time it takes to transfer information from a customer's laptop to the cloud. And in some industries, regulations mandate that certain types of data be kept in facilities within a particular country.

Microsoft has recently used its own growing footprint as a marketing tool, saying it has more regions available than Amazon or Google.

Amazon contends that its rival is overcounting, saying some of what Microsoft terms "regions" can be a single data center. By the definition Amazon uses for its own services, a region must have two geographically distinct facilities.

AWS at the end of 2016 leased or owned 8.1 million square feet of data center space, up 21 percent from a year earlier.

"Our belief is we're going to be accelerating our pace of region builds," DeSantis said in an interview on the sidelines of the show here. "And those regions are going to be growing more quickly."